The Costumes: Ngila Dickson

She once ran her own fashion magazine and dressed Hercules and Xena. Now Auckland costume designer Ngila Dickson has spent 18 months leading a 35-strong team in creating 15,000 garments for thousands of actors and extras in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Story: Melinda Williams

Within moments of arriving at the Auckland home of Ngila Dickson, costume designer for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I somehow get a splinter in my writing hand from the wooden table in her back yard. Inconvenient and slightly embarrassing as it is, I tell myself that of all the places to get a splinter, this has to be one of the more convenient ones. After all, there's probably nobody more likely to have a pincushion on hand than a costume designer.

However, when I ask to borrow a needle to remove the shard of wood, Dickson looks concerned. "Oh dear," she says. "I'm not sure I have one." A few minutes and a careful search later, her suspicion is confirmed. After spending 18 months leading a team of 35 costume makers in creating 15,000 garments, Dickson doesn't have a single pin or needle in her Ponsonby house.

Then again, after living, breathing and dreaming LOTR costumes for almost two years of her life, at times for up to 20 hours a day, Dickson may never want to see a needle and thread again. At the very least, it is hard to imagine what kind of job she would take on next after working on the most ambitious, heartbreaking and rewarding project ever accomplished in New Zealand.

"It was an opportunity to die for, really," she admits. "God, anyone would want to do something like LOTR!

Sometimes though, after weeks of 2am finishes and 6am starts, the Dunedin-born designer must have wondered if the job was literally about to kill her. But if anyone was equipped to handle the task, it was Dickson.

Prior to joining the LOTR crew, Dickson worked as head costume designer for the Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess television productions. And her film credits include Ruby and Rata, User Fliendly, Crush, Jack Be Nimble and Heavenly Creatures. She even ran her own fashion magazine back in the evil old eighties called Cha-Cha, which gave a start to the careers of a number of writers, photographers and fashion designers based in Auckland at the time.

The relationships she formed with Peter Jackson (director), Fran Walsh (writer and coproducer) and Grant Major (production designer ) during her previous film work was probably the main reason she was offered the role, suggests Dickson.

"That, and the understanding of how to work big, which I got from Hercules and Xena," she adds. "I ran a very big department and made very complex clothes and could handle impossible deadlines. But I didn't know how impossible the deadlines were about to become. And I'm certainly as nave as the next person, so you just leap in there and you say, 'Let's give it a go."'

When Dickson arrived in Wellington, six months before shooting was due to start, things were already well underway, she says.

"The way LOTR happened was very unusual. Richard Taylor and Weta [the creature design and prosthetic makeup specialists] have worked incredibly closely with Peter for years and Richard has done a lot of the creatures in Peter's films. They started development on LOTR about two and a half years before I got down there. Richard had basically poured everything into it, hoping it would come together. They had taken a huge punt in believing in what was possible. So when I arrived, Weta had already done a huge amount of research and had a whole bunch of artists working and were already well into the armour-making. It was the only way it could have been done. If they hadn't taken that punt, God only knows where we would have been."

But the head start was short-lived, she recalls. "I didn't actually end up having a crew until three months before we started. It was a bit nervewracking! And even then, I only had my core team of eight people. It was only about six weeks later that I got a full crew. So we were absolutely backs-to-the-wall from the word go. Also, Wellington doesn't have a resource in terms of costuming, whereas Auckland does. It's where the big textile houses are and you have a good people resource there. All of a sudden, those things were a plane flight away. At that stage, my blood pressure was pretty much up around my ears."

Worse was to come. Not only was time running short before filming was due to start and fabric supplies were low, Dickson discovered a third costuming factor, unique to LOTR, that was about to make an enormous difference to the number of costumes required.

In the films, the hobbit Frodo, played by Elijah Wood, is meant to be three-feet-six-inches tall. Human warrior Aragorn, played by Viggo Mortensen, is meant to be six feet tall. In real life, Mortensen really is six feet tall. However, Elijah Wood is actually five-feet-seven-inches, which creates a problem in terms of proportion. So, in scenes where the two appear together, larger and smaller body doubles were used to give the right sense of perspective. This meant that in a shot taken over Aragorn's shoulder, looking at Frodo, an actor over seven feet tall was used as a body double for Mortensen to make Wood look proportionately shorter.

For the costuming department, this initially simple-looking problem of creating multiples of each of the leads' costumes in different sizes suddenly took on nightmarish implications when factors like fabric patterns were taken into account, says Dickson.

"A whole lot of fabrics were immediately out of the question because we couldn't replicate the pattern in larger or smaller sizes. So what we did was start to develop patterned fabrics that we could hand-embroider and therefore have some control over what the design was going to do. So we could physically blow it up and re-embroider it at the new size. We also got involved with some local weavers and started weaving the fabrics at different scales.

"Like, take this patterned hobbit waistcoat," she says, pointing to a picture of Frodo. "What we did was we padded it and blew it up. It was kind of like one of those Indian bedspreads that you see around that have a kapok lining, so you get that wonderful quilted effect, which you can blow up or reduce down, depending on who it's for.

"The ramifications were really quite large," she continues. "For example, every button had to be made at different sizes. You can't just go and get them from a store. So ingenuity became an absolute must. It was a huge development problem, especially with the hobbits, because we knew that from the moment they first appeared on screen, we were stuck with that for three films. I mean, there are some changes. They do wear other clothes. But there's a predominant costume that carries through three films.

"Then there was the number of costumes that we had to produce. Say for the four hobbit characters, you've got the 'mini-me' version; you've got the actual actor's costume; you've got at least one, if not two, body doubles for other shooting units; and potentially a stunt double as well. Then you've got three films, during which a lot happens to those three characters and their costumes have to go through different stages of wear. In the end, we probably had about 10 versions of each of those costumes."

Dickson also faced the daunting challenge of making each costume define the personality of each character.

"One of the things about Frodo for me was that I always wanted to keep him slightly apart from the other hobbits," explains Dickson. "I wanted a sense of him being slightly grander, with slightly richer colours. Merry is kind of a strutter, a dude. Sam is the absolute farmer, a faithful servant. And Pip is the loose cannon. So I tried to define those characteristics through what I did with their costumes, so that when you first see them on screen you're already a bit of the way down the road with who these characters are. That also became a colour issue, working out the colours for the characters so that you know who that person is if you're seeing them from a distance.

"The thing with the hobbits was that I wanted them to be kind of naive'' she adds. "Their costumes are based very loosely on 18th to 19th century English country squire imagery But we did all sorts of things to make them a bit odd. Their sleeves are too short, their trousers are too short -- which on camera just balances out those lovely, great, big feet of theirs -- and lots of things were a bit off about the costumes. The pockets were a bit too high... You know, just little weird idiosyncrasies. And that was to prevent them from being defined as one thing or another. They're of another world and that world has some similarities, some resonance for the audience. It's something you're familiar with, even though there are bits that make you a little uncomfortable. The idea is of Middle-earth as an alternative universe."

Dickson used natural fabrics such as velvet, cotton, wool and linen so the costumes would wear incredibly well. "As soon as you get something that's man-made, you're never going to get that look," she explains. "We worked those fabrics so hard. No piece of fabric went on to a sewing machine that hadn't been washed as many times as we could possibly put it through. And we dyed almost everything. The dye-house worked night and day. That's another group of people who worked so amazingly hard, you can't imagine. Dying is such an organic process and it's so hard to be consistent with the colours. You know, we'd go to them, 'We need another Frodo coat, exactly the same colour as the one from four months ago...' It's enough to bring tears to anyone's eyes."

Deciding what to do for the elven costumes was particularly difficult, insists Dickson. "What we ended up doing -- and I think it was a great decision -- was to go for simplicity, thinking of them almost like the angels of the story. They were almost like the benefactors, always having a very other-worldly quality to them but never getting to the point where they become like fairies.

"My major motif for the elves' costumes was a sort of cross between the most simple mediaeval garments and a lot of art nouveau design lines, then adding in a kind of leaf imagery, which I used a lot," Dickson elaborates. "We used it in the sleeves so they were kind of like furled leaves, and in the jewellery, such as the crowns, and things like that."

"For the elves, we used the most sumptuous fabrics we could lay our hands on," she continues. "We did a lot of devore work on silk velvet, quite subtly, which makes it very beautiful. It's almost like a kind of wallpaper image that has settled into the fabric, so you end up with a very simple pattern. And we did a lot of embroidery.

"Overall, with the elves, we wanted a kind of calmness and a luminescence. We used a lot of tones of grey through greens and silver. But as you come more into Galadriel's world, the tones become lighter and lighter. As in, she is the light."

At the other end of the scale from the ethereal elves were the ringwraiths, a group of nine kings who turned to evil ways and gradually evolved into black-cloaked undead creatures. For their costumes, Dickson decided to first sketch the original kings and then added layer after layer of clothing based on their gradual decline.

"The costumes, when you see them on screen, just took like tattered rags but there's 50 metres of fabric in each of those costumes, layer upon layer upon layer," says Dickson. "There were so many things to look for. We wanted movement. We wanted different textures to appear from time to time to suggest where they came from..."

However, the biggest challenge of all came from a single item of clothing: the wizard Gandalf's hat.

"The original concept for Gandalf's costume came from a drawing by John Howe and what we finished with was the most extreme version," laughs Dickson. "It was like a comedy of errors in the end. There must have been about 20 versions of that hat, with the point going here, the point going there, the point bigger, the point smaller, the brim bigger, the brim smaller... It was the bane of our lives as a department. But we finally came to something that was perfect, functional yet mysterious."

Out of the thousands of costumes the wardrobe department eventually produced, Dickson says two really stood out for her.

"One of the costumes I've always loved is Aragorn's costume because it's about love. It's such a real costume. It lives. It's leather and cotton. It's such an alive costume, you could smell the sweat on it. And Viggo was just fantastic. We taught him how to darn and half the time he would take his costume home and fix it himself. He would wear it to riding practices. He wanted to be Aragorn. He would come in and say things like, 'I think I would have got a sword slash here,"' so we would sit down with him and work it out.

"The other extreme was from the sequence with Galadriel in the swan boat, where she's wearing a white velvet cloak with devore work on the shoulder . I loved that costume because it epitomised for me what the queen of the elves should like. It's one of those outfits that looks incredibly simple and so is incredibly difficult to make. The important thing about it is that you just look at Cate Blanchett and think, 'Wow, Galadriel is so beautiful,' and you don't think about the costume at all. And the less people notice the details of the costume, the better job we did, in a sense, because that means the costumes have helped absorb you completely in the story.

"That was what was so important to Peter, that it was as real as we could make it," Dickson adds. "When we were ageing the costumes, we couldn't throw enough mud and dust at them. It actually almost became hilarious, to the point where we'd go, 'Well, we think this is enough, so it definitely won't be enough for Peter,' so we'd throw some more at them."

Throughout the entire 274 days of filming, the wardrobe department worked non-stop to turn out an average of 150 costumes for each of the nine cultures in the series. At times, the team became so overloaded that they were literally finishing costumes in the van on the way to the set, confides Dickson. But she believes it was all worth it -- and not just because of the alluring glint of a particular gold statuette that may be hers in the near future.

"Movie-making is such a bittersweet industry," she admits. "I don't know anyone who could ever say they achieved everything they wanted, particularly on something of this size. It's just not possible. But, by God, we tried so hard. There were lots of tears and I'm sure there were times when people thought they were going to have a heart attack. I know there were times when I woke up in the morning and I was so exhausted that I felt I just couldn't get off the bed. But then you think, 'Well, everyone else has to, so I do too.'

"But then you have these moments when you walk onto the set and you see these incredible actors and you see Peter directing them and you feel the joy of the process of these extraordinary performances. As a costume designer, you just stand there and think, 'That's Gandalf." And you know it's Gandalf, as good as he can be done.

"Now I just can't wait for the day that I can walk into a cinema full of people who didn't work on the film and just see their reactions."